There are lots of pretty islands in the Caribbean, so folks have been understandably puzzled by our going somewhere that requires as much planning as does traveling to Cuba, but ever since seeing his home in Key West last year and his grave in Idaho the year before, I’ve badly wanted to see where Hemingway spent most of his final 20 years. And so, on a Saturday morning at 8, we climbed into the back of an ’89 Peugeot and headed east 10 miles from Havana. Our first…
Get this. From Atlanta, you can fly 90 minutes and land in a parallel world. It has 2 currencies: the CUP for locals (featuring faces and colors); the CUC for tourists (featuring statues and shades of brown). Doctors, engineers, and teachers forgo their $60/month, $40/month, and $20/month salaries to buy 1989 Peugeots or even older Russian-built Ladas for $50k to be private taxi drivers, which you can tell from the “P” leading the string of characters on their license plates. Any new cars you see will start with…